Thursday, December 14, 2017

Top 20% of Canadians own over 67% of wealth

According to Statistics Canada, there was $10.3 trillion in wealth in Canada in 2016, and Andrew Jackson (former Chief Economist with the Canadian Labour Congress) observes that more than two-thirds of it is owned by the top 20%. Jackson points out that the top 20% of Canadians own 67.3% of all net worth (assets of all kinds, minus liabilities), which we can also call their wealth. This is almost exactly the same as in 2012. In other words, the net worth of Canada’s wealthiest 20% accounted for almost $7 trillion (67.3%) of the total $10.3 trillion. On the other hand, Jackson notes that the bottom 20% of Canadians have no net worth, and the bottom 40% collectively own just 2.3% of all net worth.

Jackson also explains that the top 20% also own 74.6% of all financial assets (stocks, bonds, bank deposits, etc.) held outside of RRSPs and registered pension plans, while the bottom 40% collectively own just 3.5% of such assets. Financial assets outside of pensions total $1.4 trillion.

Jackson added that the new data does not detail the breakdown within the top 20%. Even within this group, wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of the top 10% and top 1%. According to a November 15 Statistics Canada survey on high-income trends, the highest-paid Canadians received a larger share of the country's total income in 2015 because corporate dividends helped boost their earnings. The top 1% of tax filers held 11.2% of Canada’s total income in 2015, up from 10.3% in 2014.

“Each new release of statistics confirms our worst fears about the failure of the global economic system. The rich are getting richer, and income inequality is steadily growing. And what’s also morally unconscionable is that our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop it.” — Larry Brown, National Union of Public and General Employees President

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the “impact and threat of climate-related hazards” displaced an average of 21.5 million people annually between 2008 and 2015. The growing impact of the Anthropocene -- of intensifying droughts, rising seas, and mega-storms -- is already adding to a host of other factors, including poverty, war, and persecution, that in these years have unsettled record numbers of people. While many of the climate-displaced stay close to home, hoping to salvage both their lives and livelihoods, ever more are crossing international borders in what many are now calling a “refugee crisis.”As Camila Minerva of Oxfam puts it, “The poorest and the most marginalized are five times more likely to be displaced and to remain so for a longer time than people in higher income countries and it is increasing with climate change.”The United Nations High Commission for Refugees suggests that climate breakdowns will displace 250 million people by 2050. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre suggests that those numbers could actually range from 150 million to a staggering 350 million by that year. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of the New York Times, cited a report suggesting that the number may be far higher than that, possibly reaching 700 million -- and that, by 2050, 10% percent of all Mexicans between 15 and 65 might be heading north, thanks to rising temperatures, droughts, and floods.In Climatic Cataclysm, Campbell wrote that the “sheer numbers of potentially displaced people” are prospectively “staggering.” In one assessment of what a possible 2.6 degree Celsius rise in the global temperature by 2040 might mean, Leon Fuerth, a former security adviser to Al Gore, concluded that “border problems” would overwhelm U.S. capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic methods and perhaps not even then.”

American workers are among the most productive in the world, but over the last 40 years the bottom half of income earners have seen no income growth. As a result, since 1973, worker productivity has grown almost six times faster than wages.The first myth to be dismissed is that Americans who receive public benefits are “takers” is flatly untrue for the vast majority of working-age recipients. There are recipients of public benefits who do not work. They are primarily children, the disabled and the elderly – in other words, people who cannot or should not work. These groups constitute the majority of public benefits recipients.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps, which currently serve about 42 million Americans. At least one adult in more than half of SNAP-recipient households are working. And the average SNAP subsidy is $125 per month, or $1.40 per meal – hardly enough to justify quitting a job. Every dollar in SNAP spending is estimated to generate more than $1.70 in economic activity.

As for Medicaid, nearly 80 percent of adults receiving Medicaid live in families where someone works, and more than half are working themselves.

Welfare – officially called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families – has required work as a condition of eligibility since then-President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996. And the earned income tax credit, a tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, by definition, supports only people who work.

Americans are spending more than one-third of their income on housing, which is increasingly unaffordable. There are 11 million renter households paying more than half their income on housing. And there is no county in America where a minimum wage worker can afford a two-bedroom home. Still, only 1 in 4 eligible households receive any form of government housing assistance.

Forty percent of Americans born into the bottom-income quintile – the poorest 20 percent – will stay there. As for people born into the 'middle class', only 20 percent will ascend to the top quintile in their lifetimes.

Ukrainian pensioner Mariya Semiriad has little to eat and no money to buy enough food, wood and painkillers for the winter."We can't afford anything anymore because of this war," Semiriad told the Thomson Reuters Foundation

"Ukraine has the dubious distinction of being the (world's) oldest humanitarian crisis," said Neal Walker, the U.N.'s top representative in Ukraine. In 2017 the U.N. received less than 30 percent of about $200 million it asked to tackle the crisis. Last week, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said it would stop providing food aid due to dwindling resources. "Governments tend to view this as a political crisis ... but it is also a humanitarian crisis," said Walker. The conflict is dragging on and the millions have exhausted their resources and are struggling to make ends meet. Older people are bearing the brunt of violence that has killed more than 10,000 people, including 2,500 civilians, and forced 1.6 million to flee their homes since 2014. The number of people going hungry in eastern Ukraine has doubled to 1.2 million in 2017, according to the U.N. Nearly a third of the 3.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance are over 60 years of age. Ukraine has an ageing population, with 16 percent of people over 65 in 2017 - a much higher rate than in other war-torn nations, like Syria or Yemen, where the figure stands below 5 percent. Most survive on meagre pensions, which have been eroded by fast-rising prices of food and utilities.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

"It is true that, to the mode of thought of the educated classes which Herr Dühring has inherited, it must seem monstrous that in time to come there will no longer be any professional porters or architects, and that the man who for half an hour gives instructions as an architect will also act as a porter for a period, until his activity as an architect is once again required. A fine sort of socialism that would be—perpetuating professional porters!" - Engels

A United Nations expert investigating poverty in the United States says the state of Alabama has the worst poverty in the developed world.

“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World."

This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said, according to a report in Newsweek magazine. The UN rapporteur traveled to areas where residents have fallen ill with hookworm, a disease usually seen only in extremely poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, the report said. These social conditions tend to affect minorities more frequently, with black, Hispanic and Native American children two to three times more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts, it said.

"There are pretty extreme levels of poverty in the United States given the wealth of the country and that does have significant human rights implications,” he said.In Alabama, nine out of 1,000 infants died before celebrating their first birthday in 2016. That's a higher infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka, Ukraine and many other developing countries. Alabama's relatively high infant mortality rate—second only to Mississippi in the United States—also diverges along racial lines: Black babies in Alabama died at three times the rate of white babies in 2015.The US's overall 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births trails behind 55 other nations and a similar infant mortality rate as Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Official government numbers underestimate the problems of poverty in America.

Officially, the 2017 federal poverty level is $12,060 for one individual and $24,600 for a family of four. In 2016, the U.S. poverty rate was 12.7% with about 41 million Americans including 14 million children living in poverty.

The child poverty rate of 19% is consistent with federal estimates of child hunger – about one in five children lack consistent access to sufficient and healthy food. For minority children, about one in three African American, Native American and Hispanic American children live in poverty often without access to sufficient food. Globally, the USA rank 1st in wealth and 18th in the number of children living in poverty.

Many dispute the government’s interpretation of poverty levels and rates by questioning whether rules created in the 1960s take into account basic living expenses in 2017. Many believe that poverty in America is about twice the official federal numbers with nearly 100 million Americans living in or near poverty.

Research from organizations such as the National Center for Children in Poverty and the Economic Policy Institute calculated the sum of food, housing, transportation, health care, child care, taxes and other expenses for a modest standard of living and concluded that poverty in America touches nearly 50% of the population. These analyses suggest that doubling the official formula and then building programs for both the 100% and 200% federal poverty levels would yield better outcomes.

Some programs already trend in this direction. For example, children living in households at 185% or less of the federal poverty level are eligible for reduced lunch.

Related data support this broader view:

The latest research shows that no one working for the minimum wage of $7.25 can rent a basic two-bedroom apartment in any of our United States.

6% of public school students participate in free or reduced price lunch.

45% percent of homeless people work at least part-time.

40% of all workers are temporary, on-call, or contractors with no benefits; research suggests all the job growth in the last ten years is for such “alternative work arrangements” – where illness or a broken-down car may mean losing a job and even a home.

78% percent of working Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

National numbers only tell part of the story – states and counties show vastly different ranges of children and families in poverty.

Clearly, the fear of overpopulation is widespread. But the truth is that overpopulation in the United States is not even close to a serious problem. Even globally, overpopulation is an overstated problem. The truth is that the rest of the world has plenty of potential for increased food production: more than enough to feed itself and provide imports for a more populous United States.

To start with just the United States. How many people can the country support? Because I am an agricultural economist by profession, my bias is to first think about food. One simple question is how many people can the United States feed? Well, our net agricultural exports account for about 25 percent of the physical volume of agricultural production, which suggests that if we redirected those exports internally, the US could probably support approximately 25 percent more people. That’s assuming current technology and current diets and current land use. In short, we could feed more than 400 million people, total, merely by consuming locally what we now export.

Consider that the European Union has approximately 300 people per square mile, making it as dense as the ninth-densest US state (that is, similar to Pennsylvania or Florida). The continental United States, on the whole, has about 110 people per square mile (excluding Alaska, an outlier), making the US less than one-third as densely peopled as the EU. Yet the European Union, too, has roughly balanced or even slightly positive agricultural trade. That suggests that Europe, too, has no trouble feeding itself despite being three times as densely settled as the United States.

If the continental United States were as heavily settled as the EU, the US would have nearly a billion people living in it. Granted, the Western US is extremely dry and thus might not support an EU-density population. Nonetheless, if just the states east of the Mississippi had European-style population density, and the other states maintained current population, then the United States would still have more than 400 million people. Achieving European-style densities wouldn’t require technological change. It wouldn’t even require any non-voluntary lifestyle changes or new regulations.

The concern with overpopulation, naturally, often dovetails with concerns about climate change. Won’t higher population devastate the environment? We can’t solve our climate-change problems by having fewer babies. Even if US population stopped growing at around 325 million people in 2017 and flatlined out, it would produce at best a marginal change in global emissions. Plus, accomplishing that trend would require draconian anti-fertility policies and extremely strict immigration laws. Even if US population rises over 500 million people, the impact on the world is barely noticeable. Meanwhile, lowering US carbon intensity by about a third, to around the level of manufacturing-superpower Germany today, has a bigger effect than preventing 100 million Americans from existing.

We should provide the resources for women to take control of their fertility. We should want to reduce undesired conceptions and increase desired conceptions. We should facilitate the kind of human development that tends to reduce desired fertility from the four- to seven-child range to the two- to four-child range as well. But we should do these things because it is to empower individual decision-making, not because we can save the climate through Malthusian reductions.

About one-third of Israeli citizens live below the official poverty line, the Latet organisation’s Alternative Poverty Report revealed.2.5m Israelis are classed as poor; that’s 29.1 per cent of the population. The figure is made up of 1.46m adults and 1.06m children; one in every three children is poor.

Ryanair pilots in Germany, Ireland, Italy and Portugal have voted to engage in some form of industrial action in the near future. The Irish Airline Pilots’ Association (IALPA) said that its Ryanair staff members will strike on Wednesday, December 20.Pilots in Italy and Portugal also voted for similar action over the past week.Vereinigung Cockpit (VC), the German pilots union that represents some Ryanair pilots based in Germany, announced the decision to take industrial action although it is not yet clear when it would take place or indeed, precisely what form it will take.Ryanair has steadfastly refused to engage with unions over the years, but relations between the airline and its staff — particularly pilots — have become increasingly strained. Rostering issues, combined with what is believed to have been a significant shortage of available pilots, is believed to have the main cause of the mass cancellations. Since then, an increasing number of Ryanair pilots have been seeking collective bargaining power rights. So far, Ryanair has refused to engage in any collective union negotiations.It is almost one year since Ryanair pilots based in Germany formed a "company council" as part of the Vereinigung Cockpit union to represent their interests in Germany. As well as that, the recently formed European Employee Representative Council (EERC) is seeking to represent Ryanair pilots based across Europe but mirroring its policy towards unions, Ryanair has so refused to engage with it.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Permafrost in the Arctic is thawing faster than ever, according to a new US government report that also found Arctic seawater is warming and sea ice is melting at the fastest pace in 1,500 years. Scientists remain concerned because the far northern region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe and has reached a level of warming that’s unprecedented in modern times. About 79% of the Arctic sea ice is thin and only a year old. In 1985, 45% of the sea ice in the Arctic was thick, older ice, said NOAA Arctic scientist Emily Osborne.“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic; it affects the rest of the planet,” said acting NOAA chief Timothy Gallaudet. “The Arctic has huge influence on the world at large.”“2017 continued to show us we are on this deepening trend where the Arctic is a very different place than it was even a decade ago,” said Jeremy Mathis, head of NOAA’s Arctic research program and co-author of the report “The Arctic has traditionally been the refrigerator to the planet, but the door of the refrigerator has been left open,” Mathis said.

From 2012 to 2017, global wealth increased by $37.7 trillion, and U.S. wealth increased by $26 trillion. Thus, largely because of a surging stock market, our nation took nearly 70 percent of the entire global wealth gain over the past five years. Based on their dominant share of U.S. wealth, America's richest 10%—much less than 1% of the world's adult population—took over half the world's wealth gain in the past five years.

Asenior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Richard Reeves describes in his new book, Dream Hoarders, that while the top 1 percent overwhelmingly receives a disproportionate share of economic gains, the upper middle class is also "hoarding" resources. Families in the 80th to the 99th percentiles—or those earning at least $112,000—have made out pretty well over the past 35 years. Since 1980, incomes for the top 1 percent skyrocketed, and wages for those in the next 19 percent increased considerably. Comparably, the bottom 80 percent saw wages stagnate. Reeves details how the wage gains for the top 20 percent translate into access to better schools, better colleges, and, eventually, better jobs with higher wages.Census data from 2015 demonstrate that just 5 percent of Black households have an annual income of $150,000 or more, compared to 12 percent of White households. In contrast, 22 percent of Black households earn less than $15,000 a year, which is double the 11 percent rate for White households. In terms of income trends, Blacks are the only racial group that actually saw a decline in their real income since 2000. The 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that Black households have median wealth of about $17,600 (inclusive of home equity), in contrast to $171,000 in median wealth for White households. And these disparities persist and even worsen factoring in education. Black families where the head of household has a college degree have less wealth than White families where the head of household dropped out of high school.

8.4 million people who are "a step away from famine" in Yemen, a senior U.N. official said.Jamie McGoldrick, the Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, said the blockade has since been eased, but the situation remained dire. "The continuing blockade of ports is limiting supplies of fuel, food and medicines; dramatically increasing the number of vulnerable people who need help.""The lives of millions of people, including 8.4 million Yemenis who are a step away from famine, hinge on our ability to continue our operations and to provide health, safe water, food, shelter and nutrition support," he added. The United Nations says food shortages caused by the warring parties blocking supplies has created the world's worst humanitarian crisis

Workers in Britain look set to suffer another hit to their spending power in 2018 while most of their peers in the world’s other big rich economies will have small gains, human resources firm Korn Ferry said.A combination of high inflation and weak wage growth means British workers are expected to see their salaries fall in real terms by 0.5 percent next year, according to a survey published by the firm. The most recent official data has shown British average weekly earnings fell by an annual 0.4 percent in the three months to September when adjusted for inflation.Globally, inflation-adjusted wages are expected to rise by 1.5 percent next year, Korn Ferry said, the weakest predicted increase in five years, underscoring the challenge for policymakers in many countries where unemployment is low but wage growth is weak. Benjamin Frost, Korn Ferry’s global general manager, said the situation in Britain was aggravated by the jump in inflation which hit 3 percent in October and is expected to stay at that level when data for November is released on Tuesday. “What stands out is that employers are not increasing their pay rises to account for that,” he said. “They have limited ability to charge their customers more and improvements in productivity are easier said than done in the short term.”In the United States, workers were expected to see a real-terms salary increase of 1 percent in 2018, based on forecasts of wage increases of 3 percent and inflation of 2 percent.

A poll of employers across nine different industry sectors found a net balance of just 4% were planning to increase staff levels rather than make cuts in the final months of the year. London and the south-east are home to the most pessimistic firms, where the outlook has fallen to 0% and 3% respectively.

The latest ONS data provided signs that the jobs boom has petered out following the slowdown in growth in the first half of 2017.

The recent figures from the ONS found that output per hour worked rose by 0.9% between the second and third quarters of 2017.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank published a report finding that one in 10 of Britain’s workers put in paid overtime last year but only one-fifth of them got the “time-and-a half” premium for their extra hours.

The share of employees working overtime has fallen from 17% in 1997 to 10% in 2016, the thinktank said, adding that the premium paid over wage rates had also shrunk.

Half of those doing paid overtime enjoyed a premium of at least 10% last year (down from 61% in 1997), while 20% of those doing overtime got “time and a half” (down from 25%).

European leaders stand accused by Amnesty International of being knowingly complicit in the torture and exploitation of thousands of migrants and refugees by the EU-financed Libyan coastguard and officials running the country’s detention camps. In an attempt to stem the flow of people across the Mediterraneanto Europe, the EU is financing a system that routinely acts in collusion with militia groups and people traffickers to “make money from human suffering”, a report from the human rights group claims.

Amnesty claims the coastguard and those to whom they hand over refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, are often acting in cahoots with criminal gangs and militia. Agreements between the coastguard and smugglers are signalled by markings on boats that allow specific vessels to pass through Libyan waters without interception, it is claimed. The coastguard has also been known to escort boats out to international waters. Those are who are intercepted on their way to Europe are sent to camps run by the Libyan general directorate for combating illegal migration (DCIM), where torture for the purposes of extracting money is almost routine, Amnesty reports.

After interviews with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants and meetings with Libyan officials and others with knowledge of the abuses, Amnesty claims it now has sufficient evidence to take leaders of EU states to international courts over alleged abuses of human right obligations.

“You will see us in court,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty’s Europe director. “Hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya are at the mercy of the Libyan authorities, militias, armed groups and smugglers often working seamlessly together for financial gain. Tens of thousands are kept indefinitely in overcrowded detention centres where they are subjected to systematic abuse. European governments have not just been fully aware of these abuses; by actively supporting the Libyan authorities in stopping sea crossings and containing people in Libya, they are complicit in these crimes.”

It is claimed by Amnesty that the EU member states “cannot plausibly claim to be unaware of the grave violations being committed by some of the detention officials and coastguard agents with whom they are so assiduously cooperating”.

Up to 20,000 people are currently held in what the Amnesty report, Libya’s Dark Web of Collusion, says are overcrowded, unsanitary centres, often under the control of militia and criminals. “For some time there has been concern that the price for stemming migration has been the human rights of those seeking to come to the EU,” the report says. The reports says: “The lack of any judicial oversight of the detention process and the near total impunity with which officials operate has facilitated the institutionalisation of torture and other ill-treatment in detention centres.”

In March, a review by the UK Independent Commission for Aid Impact said the UK role in the capacity-building programme with the Libyan coastguard was “delivering migrants back to a system that leads to indiscriminate and indefinite detention and denies refugees their right to asylum”.

The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, has described the suffering of migrants in Libyan camps as an “outrage to the conscience of humanity”.

A massive vote of confidence in Britain’s economy was how Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson described BAE Systems’ £5bn deal to sell 24 Typhoon fighter jets to Qatar. It’s also a massive vote of confidence in the willingness of the British to sell weapons to anyone whose money is good. Qatar is hardly a model of enlightened democracy. According to Williamson, these “formidable jets” will boost the Qatari military in its mission to “support stability in the region” and deliver “security at home”. But quite how isn’t entirely clear.

Qatar has been isolated by Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudis, all of which have accused it of sponsoring terrorism. It has responded to this by ramping up military spending. The arms deal is destined to stoke tensions in one of the world’s more dangerous regions. So where will the stability arise from?

Arms sales are increasing around the world. Munitions, tanks, drones: The global trade in arms and military services increased again in 2016. It was up 1.9 percent on the previous year — and 38 percent compared to 2002. These new figures are from the latest report on the international arms industry by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It says that in 2016 the world's 100 biggest armaments groups sold 374.8 billion US dollars-worth of weapons and weapons systems.The United States' armaments groups are producing and selling more weapons. According to the report, sales from US firms rose 4 percent in 2016, totaling 217.2 billion US dollars. This was not only because of the US' own military deployments abroad: The figure was also boosted by the purchase of large weapons systems by other countries. The US group Lockheed Martin — the biggest weapons producer worldwide — did lucrative business selling its new F-35 to countries like Britain, Italy or Norway. Its biggest customer, though, is the United States Air Force. Once again, the report clearly shows that the majority of arms come from American companies — a total of 57.9 percent of all global arms sales. Western Europe takes second place in the list of the most important suppliers of arms, followed by Russia with 7.1 percent of arms sales around the world. The SIPRI researchers believe China may also be a top weapons manufacturer. The country does not, however, appear in their statistics, because the experts have no reliable data on the Chinese arms trade. "But we assume that Chinese armaments groups are among the top 20 biggest companies in the world," says Aude Fleurant. German and British groups increased their turnover. The German tank manufacturer Krauss-Maffei, for example, and Rheinmetall, which makes military vehicles, profited from the demand for their products in Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia. There is no question but that wars prompt individual states to procure weapons. When crises threaten, countries spend more money on more modern arms: They buy new warships, fighter jets and tanks, and armaments groups sell more as a result."Nonetheless, it's very difficult to make a direct connection between large arms purchases and ongoing wars. But of course there are links: There's a greater demand for certain types of weapon — munitions, missiles or ground vehicles, for example,” says Aude Fleurant, Director of the Arms and Military Expenditure Program at SIPRI. The rise in arms sales around the world is also a response to smoldering conflicts, she adds. "We observe that in some regions the perceived threat is increasing."South Korea is one example of this. In 2016 South Korean firms reported huge 20.6 percent increase in arms sales. "That quite clearly has to do with the security situation in the region," Fleurant says. South Korea feels seriously threatened by the nuclear provocations of its neighbor North Korea — and is increasing its military expenditure in response. South Korean arms manufacturers, who mainly sell to their country's defense ministry, are profiting from this.The traditional weapons importers apparently ran out of money in 2016. "The falling commodity prices for oil and gas have put such a strain on the public finances of many African and South American countries that they bought fewer weapons than planned," says SIPRI researcher Fleurant. Russia's armaments groups were also affected by the crisis.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

In Govanhill, in Glasgow, the besmirching of another immigrant community is in full spate. A century ago, it was the poor Irish, fleeing famine and persecution by the British government, who were being demonised. Now it’s the turn of the Roma people.

Britain’s largest concentration of Roma families resides in Glasgow, where they began to settle in numbers following the 2004 expansion of the EU.

The Roma community, mainly from Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, were among those who took advantage of free movement. They are a travelling people and are among the world’s most persecuted minorities. They have always provided an easy target for the hard right in any country where they settle. When widespread social inequality prevails, the presence of any minority provides an opportunity for reactionaries to camouflage its real causes.

The Irish immigrants were depicted as unclean, savage and given to base desires; they were regarded as something less than human. Later, Glasgow became home to thousands of Asian families. They, too, encountered discrimination, but the sullen resentment soon gave way to acceptance.

Glasgow’s Roma community in Govanhill are a people accustomed to living on the margins of society and wearily familiar with the loathing that accompanies them on their travels. This has bred in them a suspicion and resentment of authority and a spirit of stubborn self-reliance. As such, many of their children pass into adulthood without anything resembling a formal education.

In recent weeks, the Roma have been subject to a newspaper report short on fact and heavy on insinuation claimed that there was widespread evidence of Roma families selling their children into prostitution. The lurid tales fed on unsubstantiated claims from nameless individuals that have been whispered in the area for a decade or so. The police and Glasgow city council have been aware of these claims, too, but insist that they have never received any information worthy of investigation. The shocking child sex abuse claims sit at the apex of a collection of social evils, steadily escalating by degrees of luridness, which have been blamed on the Roma. These range from tenement backcourts being deployed as fly-tipping areas to tales of a crime wave caused by rampaging Roma youth.

The recent child sex abuse claims also require some scrutiny. Some of the responses accompanying stories about the Roma are utterly devoid of any compassion and replete with the language of Ukip and Britain First. This led police chiefs to warn some about the “need to be very careful about the language they are using”. Much of the outrage purports to be concerned about issues of child welfare and a sudden burst of compassion for “our own poor”, where none existed before. It ignores the fact of child welfare issues in the indigenous white communities in other parts of the city. Certainly, the claims of child sex abuse, no matter how threadbare, need to be investigated. Let’s just hope that these are not merely being used to mask something sinister. And if true that such allegations of child exploitation have existed for a decade, we need to ask whether Roma children were afforded the same protection and resources as offered to non-Roma children. Why havepeople been willing to pass these stories around the community for at least 10 years now without any concerted effort to get the police or social workers involved?

Saturday, December 09, 2017

The Socialist Party is a political party of the working class, for the working class, for socialism, for a sustainable future and a world without profit.

The biggest myth is that hunger and food security are the result of food scarcity. We produce one and a half times more than enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet. People go hungry because they are poor and don’t have enough money to buy the food being produced. Calls to “double food production” are half a century old. Instead of ending hunger they have indebted farmers who borrow money to buy newer, bigger, and more expensive inputs, only to see prices bottom out because of a glut of food on the market.

It’s not scarcity but overproduction that is driving hunger and getting the agrifoods corporations and their shareholders very rich. Of the billion or so hungry people in the world, most are the poor farmers who actually produce 70 percent of the world’s food, but they can’t even afford to feed themselves. They don’t need expensive inputs, they need more land, access to water, and to health, education, and welfare services.

No consumer, farmer, or activist participates in the food system without also participating in capitalism. This is a basic truth that’s too often overlooked in the struggle to change our broken food system.

In his new book, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, Eric Holt-Giménez describes these basic truths of capitalism and how they are connected to the history of our food system. Part history book, part practical guide, the book links many of the injustices associated with food to other inequities, arguing that capitalism fuels and is fueled by oppression. If we better understand “the rudiments of how capitalism operates,” he explains, “we can better grasp why our food system is the way it is, and how we can change it.” Holt-Giménez said “I realized that many food activists—mostly in the U.S.—had no analysis of the root causes of the problems they were dealing with. Many people were genuinely surprised when I pointed out that we had a capitalist food system, and that it was going to act the way capitalism acted... I also provide some very basic concepts in political economy (use and exchange value, surplus value, the agrarian question, socially necessary labor time, land rent, parity, etc.) and show how they can be used to understand why the food system does what it does...”

He concludes “We can’t change the food system in isolation from the capitalist system because they are systemically and historically connected...There are no magic small-scale projects that bring about whole-system transformation in and of themselves...Right now the global market makes our decisions for us—which just means the big corporations with the most market power will continue to put profits before people and before the environment. We need the concerted power of social movements to change that. Otherwise, we can be assured that whenever our hopeful alternatives really start working for us, they will be co-opted by capitalism. ..It is important to eat according to one’s values—organic, fair trade, local, etc.—but conscious consumption—essentially a market-based approach to transforming capitalism—comes up short because sooner or later capitalism ends up absorbing these products into the system.”https://civileats.com/2017/12/08/capitalism-is-a-barrier-to-food-justice/